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37 CFR 1.71 (d)(e)
A portion of the disclosure of this patent document contains material that is subject to copyright protection. The copyright owner has no objection to the facsimile reproduction by anyone of the patent disclosure, as it appears in the Patent and Trademark Office patent files or records, but otherwise reserves all copyright rights whatsoever.
The subject invention relates generally to a method of saving and retrieving information in a computer network environment and more particularly to a method and apparatus for saving and restoring the properties of controls in a general screen dialog.
A graphical user interface (GUI) is a type of display that enables a user to choose commands, start programs, and see lists of files and other options by pointing to pictorial representations (icons) and lists of menu items on a screen. The GUI presentation configures a screen to provide a graphical display for a user to enter or view information. Specifically, an application program executing on the computer system presents the information to the user through a window by drawing images, graphics, or text within the window region. The user, in turn, communicates with the application by interfacing with objects in the window region with a cursor that is typically controlled by a user-operated input device, such as by pointing and clicking the object using a mouse.
One of the distinct advantages of a GUI is a standardized graphical presentation of information and user interface objects or xe2x80x9ccontrols.xe2x80x9d Such controls include sizable windows, menus, pushbuttons, scroll bars, checkboxes and the like. User input is received by a GUI program via menus, pushbuttons, list boxes, edit boxes, mouse xe2x80x9cclicksxe2x80x9d alone or coupled with keystrokes, keyboard commands and other techniques well known to those skilled in the art. Programs developed for GUIs have a more consistent appearance, and menu structures have advanced to the point where most software developers adhere to a fairly standard format for common menu command items such as FILE, EDIT, FORMAT, WINDOW, HELP, etc., thereby enabling the user to become more rapidly proficient in using a new GUI based program.
The visual representation of a GUI window that is displayed when a program is executed is referred to as a xe2x80x9cform.xe2x80x9d Forms can be created in a number of ways known to those skilled in the art, where an easy and commonly used programming development system is Visual Basic(copyright) (hereinafter VB) from Microsoft Corporation. In designing a form for a GUI program, VB allows a programmer to simply use a click-drag mouse operation to insert a visual object on a form. User interface visual objects are referred to as xe2x80x9ccontrolsxe2x80x9d in the VB programming environment. Each form typically contains a plurality of controls controllable by a user. Based upon user activation of the controls as well as user input, the state of the controls will provide a variety of information about the user""s responses. The collective activation of the controls on a form and the responses to the controls is known as the screen dialog.
The state of the controls on a form may be as simple as a few selections on a single dialog which have been xe2x80x9cclickedxe2x80x9d or may be as complex as a navigation through, many dialogs. There is often a need for saving the current state of the transient controls on the screen dialog so that the screen dialog can be easily reconstructed. Most existing solutions for saving the state of the controls of a screen dialog create a script to replay when the user wishes to restore the screen dialog. With this approach, after the form has been saved, the user then locates the form through conventional utilities, translates the form into a script, parses the script using an interpreter, and rebuilds the form. This method of saving and rebuilding a form unfortunately requires scripts to be designed for each particular application. Thus, while the approach does allow a screen dialog to be restored, it is, in effect, an interpreter, requiring the use of an existing interpretive engine and language or implementation of a new one.
In addition to simplifying the manner in which the current state of a screen dialog can be saved and restored, it is desirable to provide a method of saving and restoring the properties of controls in a screen dialog without requiring the use of a known script and interpreter.
A system and method for dynamically saving the properties of transient controls in a general screen dialog and enabling these properties to be restored at a later time. In a typical GUI based computer program, a number of user interface objects or xe2x80x9ccontrolsxe2x80x9d are presented graphically to a user on a form to allow the user to input information by interfacing these controls. The activation of the various controls on the form by a user is referred to as the screen dialog. The present invention allows a user of the computer system to save the current state of a form""s transient controls to a database, where this form can later be restored with its transient controls being in the same state as when the form was saved. A screen dialog save procedure loops through all of the controls on a form and inserts a record of each control type along with its respective property values into a database. A user may browse through saved screen dialogs in the database and select a desired screen dialog to restore. A screen dialog restore procedure loops through all of the controls saved in the database for the selected screen dialog, where a record of the control information for each control is obtained and the property values for each respective control is set on the restored form. The present invention allows the properties of controls within screen dialogs to be saved and restored without the need for scripting.